I was asked by my good friends in the band Mountains of Blow (formerly of the short-lived Exoneration, and east-coast hardcore bands Moment of Youth and Shitfit) to create a piece of artwork for their upcoming as-yet untitled record. They also asked for something akin to a logo, that could be used on t-shirts. A pretty open-ended request which can make this kind of thing extremely hard to pin down.

I tend to draw hands a lot and this isn’t any different, in fact it’s based off a stream-of-consciousness doodle in an old sketchbook. I tried to make it kind of crude and eroded and not so streamlined and graphic, taking inspiration from American hardcore DIY design which is itself made using a lot of found imagery. It’s supposed to look like an illustration lifted from an old spiritual volume, or the Mysteries of the Unknown series by Time-Life Books (Cosmic Duality? Powers of Healing?). Kind of ambiguous and subversively positive, some next-level perception of the energies that connect us and how powerful those connections really are. But without the creepy ambiguously-christian couple handing it to you outside a random college town dive bar.

(More to come as this project develops…) ◊